bazbt3 🔬

I’m somewhat hesitant to wish everyone a “Happy New Year!”, leaning instead towards “All my very best wishes for a peaceful and fun 2025.”

Now 2024 wasn’t the best from personal and health perspectives.

Our beloved Ruby dog passed away at the end of June, just 3 weeks before we went on a holiday close to Hadrian’s Wall, Northumberland. We scattered her ashes at Warkworth beach, I believe her favourite place on earth – it’s certainly the place we first let her run free.

The girls are doing well, the oldest on her final year of 6th form college before university, and the youngest in the first year of GCSE studies in high school. We’re so proud of both.

Our matriarch Mollie cat is 15-ish now and showing some signs of slowing down, whereas Stella cat who joined us last year is flourishing – so much so that maybe we do need to follow the vet’s advice and reduce her food intake.

My wife is getting progressively more tired of the ineptitude and absence of care shown by her work managers, and her health isn’t great – as I mentioned in another post.

Me, I’m still getting over the covid from 2023 and the whooping cough from earlier in 2024. And the blood pressure meds mean I can’t eat grapefruit or the juice. No great loss there then.

All that remains then, all my very best wishes for a peaceful and fun 2025; life’s what you make it, right?

Ouch, how the heck did that happen‽ Lots of relatively small payments added together, that’s how it happened.

And 2 lots of vets bills for Pumpkin puppy’s squitty tummy definitely contributed.

Look, she’s worth every penny of course, but we really do need to be thinking seriously of pet insurance.

The great thing about the size of the bill is it gives me the ability to focus on my New Year’s resolutions for 2025, but more on that another time.

My first prediction, I’ll make New Year’s resolutions. Though I don’t always blog about it I talk about making some every year.

A quick, non-exhaustive list.

• Same as it ever was (a recap of 2017’s in 2019).
• Resolutionary (early 2017 recap).
• End (2016).
• Wrapping (2015).

World and domestic political events are a difficult thing for me to talk about publicly. I’ve no influence and so often keep my views private. You’ll find examples on this blog where internalising just takes too long. Hoping my views are on the right side of history. Searching my blog with a term I carefully pre-selected might be useful to at least start to determine my character.

Anyway, 2025?

• The Ukraine war will end.
• The Israel vs Gaza/Lebanon/Iran/Syria/common decency/etc. conflicts will end.
• Lawmakers in the USA will start the process of changing the amendments to their Constitution to make it easy for unlimited terms for incumbents they like.
• Still-active emergency powers in the USA will be used against anyone the people in power do not like.
• The United Kingdom’s politicians will lurch towards the right, populism will become the de-facto way of engaging with the public.
• The NFL’s Cleveland Browns will win more games than this abysmally unrelenting 2024 season.
• I’ll get a new car to replace my 15 year-old people carrier/minivan. Not looking forward to the upcoming repair bills before that happens.
• I’ll execrice. exorcise. exa. Er… do exercise. Having a puppy now nearly 6 months old helps a lot with basic fitness. Heck, I even ran a couple of times with her the last couple of days. Not prolonged, incorporated into more of a fartlek-style walk

You’ve my oldest daughter to blame for this, I was only going to say I’d eat more healthily in the new year.

Some of her predictions are:

• King Charles passes away.
• Trisha Paytas has a new baby. [Who she?]
• Cancelled influencers gain redemption by becoming less self-centred.
• US terrorist attack on a major city, either Chicago or San Francisco.
• Twitter shuts down, either eschewing a physical headquarters or eliminating links within ‘X’ entirely.
• My Chemical Romance’s 5th album.
• More CEO deaths, not restricted to the health insurance industry.
• Jimmy Fallon gets cancelled or loses influence in an altogether more final way.
• Chappell Roan becomes a full country.
• The UK retirement ages rise. Again.
• The UK Heath Secretary is fired, not for an affair but for corruption.

There were more but I’ve determined that it’s now teatime!

I just opened Ulysses writing app on my iPhone for maybe the third time since the company moved to a subscription model. I’m not saying I don’t value the app enough, it’s just that I already finished writing the book that common lore says we all have within us.

But I’ve just found Ulysses can now post directly to Micro.blog and… will my pre-subscription app allow a connection?

If you’re reading this, what do you think?

…

Some time later…

…

No. Medium, Wordpress.com and Custom Wordpress are the 3 options.

Ah well, I cannot justify the cost of a subscription, even via SetApp. Maybe I’ll try one of the many other apps I’ve used over the years and copy and paste instead. Like a caveman.

Not DEVONthink though, that’d be silly.

Drafts then.

A thought-provoking link post by @ianbetteridge on Mastodon:

“This article really hits the nail on the head about so-called “ultra processed foods”, a meaningless category so broad as to group together tofu and twinkies as if they had the same health impact.”

https://mastodon.well.com/@ianb/113735526001314117

From the article:

“If you’re confused, don’t feel bad — some of the world’s top nutrition experts are, too.”

Maybe I should have read this before my lamb sausages, fried onions and microwaved tomatoes, tomato ketchup (Tesco, none of that Heinz crap) on tortilla wraps for breakfast? Delicious as they were.

And here’s a link to the article:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/391795/ultra-processed-foods-science-vegan-meat-rfk-maha

And here is a photo of the sausages in the pack:

Micro.blog has a bookshelf - a list of the books one wants to read, is reading, and has read.

Want to read: The Sad Bastard Cookbook | Food you can make so you don’t die by Zilla Novikov & Rachel A. Rosen, illustrated by Marten Norr 📚

I just added this book to the micro.blog library as I couldn’t find it either by title or ISBN. (Stopped short of adding it to the Open Library as all this is new to me).

I’m sure it’s just me but I can’t summon up the enthusiasm to continue even to crosspost to the Bluesky site. Why? Well, 2 reasons. My social home is the Mastodon-based appdot.net, and now I’ve tried it I cannot decide between my self-hosted WordPress blog and one at Micro.blog.

I’m using Bluesky to pull together a few sports reporters and social accounts recently moved from Twitter/X.

The social aspect of being able to blog at Micro.blog and have replies in-line with the posts is compelling. However I’ve been using WordPress for some years now and I’m comfortable with it, but the official plugin linking it to Mastodon simply didn’t work for me. And if I’ve got this right I can continue with the WordPress blog and have it imported to Micro.blog – magic! I know it’s one-way so if I post to Micro.blog it won’t appear in the WordPress blog, but hey, do I care?

Not really.

So what’s next? A todo list:

• I’ve turned off crossposting to Bluesky.
• I need to unfollow the ‘Bridgy Fed’ bot to terminate the link between appdot.net and Bluesky.
• I’ll probably add text in my Bluesky bio to mark it ‘read-only’.
• I’m definitely going to experiment with retaining a link between my WordPress blog and the Micro.blog site for the duration of the free trial. At least hoping it’s automatic.
• I’m unlikely to link my domain with Micro.blog within the trial period, even though it’s recommended to do it.

I’m so glad I’ve chosen to think about this over the weekend, it’s bordering on an obsession this trying to find out how things work.

If you’re wondering why I’m not following anyone here on Micro.blog (yet) it would not be fair to raise expectations, I’m still experimenting and not that interesting. :)

Edit, a few minutes later:

I thought it was simply a timeline post and therefore of less consequence than a blog post. So now I’ve given it a title and added padding to add, er… consequence.

Um… and I’ve gone over the 300 characters. What happens now??

Edit, a few seconds later:

I might be following someone.

Husband, father. 2 cats, 1 dog. Cleveland Browns fan. Engineer. English. Prefers asynchronous chat (unreliable). 1st computer 1981, asking silly questions online since 1997.

Same name elsewhere in the fediverse.

#QuoteSunday ex #ADN poster

Reddit:

• r/Browns
• r/FuckModell
• r/spacebrowns

I came across 2 posts yesterday, How bad is link-rot on my blog! by @Edent@mastodon.social, and a teaser post about a new micro.blog service. by @manton@manton.org.

The first prompted me to start checking my WordPress’s internal and outgoing links, using the Broken Link Checker | Finder.

Not as bad as I thought it would be, and the plug-in is a lot easier to use and reports more comprehensively than I guessed.

The second link had me signing up to micro.blog’s 10 day free trial. Yes, I did just see Manton is removing it in favour of a “pay, or not” model. Bad timing Baz?

So far I like the way comments seem to attach to posts, but I don’t particularly like quite a few things actually…

Anyway, trial period.

/looking forward to seeing how this markdown post formatting works across platforms. Already I’ve noticed ‘_’ for italics, not ‘*’, is the default in the iOS app.